John Updike - The Centaurus

The couple was blessed with two offspring, of which George was the second. In March of 1900, when George was three, his father resigned his Staten Island pastorate and accepted the call of the First Presbyterian Church of Passaic, New Jersey, at the corner of Grove Street and Passaic Avenue-a splendid structure of yellow limestone still standing and recently enlarged. It was here that for two decades John Caldwell was destined to shed his learning, wry wit, and firmly held faith upon the upturned faces of his flock. So it was that Passaic, of old called Acquackanonk, a gentle river town whose rural beauties were at that time far from eclipsed by the vigor of its industry, came to be the seat of George Caldwell’s rearing.

Many still living in this city remember him as a cheerful boy, adept at all sports and as skilled in retaining friends as at making them. His nickname was “Sticks”-presumably an allusion to an unusual physical thinness. Following his father’s intellectual bent, he showed an early interest in formal science, though in later years he claimed, with the joking modesty so intrinsic to the man, that the height of his ambition was to become a druggist. Fortunately for a generation of Olinger students, Fate decreed otherwise.

Mr. Caldwell’s young manhood was troubled by the premature death of his father and by America’s participation in the First World War. An instinctive and natural patriot, he enlisted in the Headquarters Troop of the Seventy-Eighth Division late in 1917 and narrowly survived, at Fort Dix, the great flu epidemic which was then sweeping the camps. He stood ready, Serial No. 2414792, for overseas duty when the Armistice was declared; George Caldwell would never again come so close to leaving the continental boundaries of the nation he was to enrich as worker, teacher, churchman, civic leader, son, husband, and father.

In the years following his military discharge, George Caldwell, now-with his sister, who had married-his mother’s sole support, was engaged at a variety of jobs: as a door-todoor salesman of encyclopedias, as the driver of a sightseeing bus in Atlantic City, as athletic supervisor in the Paterson Y. M. C. A., as a railroad fireman on the New York, Susquehanna, and Western Line, and even as a hotel bellhop and restaurant dishwasher. In 1920 he enrolled in Lake College, near Philadelphia, and, with no financial assistance save that engendered by his own efforts, succeeded in graduating with distinction in 1924, having majored in chemistry. While compiling an excellent academic record and sustaining a demanding schedule of part-time employment, he as well earned an athletic scholarship that reduced his tuition by half. For three years a guard on the Lake football varsity, he suffered a broken nose a total of seventeen times, a severely dislocated kneecap twice, and a leg and a collarbone fracture once each. It was there, on the lovely campus whose central jewel is the shining oak-lined lake deemed sacred by the Lenni Lenape (the “Original People”), that he met and was enchanted by Miss Catherine Kramer, whose family were indigenous to the Fire Township region of Alton County. In 1926 the couple married, in Hagerstown, Maryland, and for the next half-decade travelled widely through the Middle Atlantic States including Ohio and West Virginia, George being employed, as cable splicer, by the Bell Telephone and Tele graph Company.

“Blessings come in strange disguises.” In 1931 the national destiny again intruded upon the personal; due to the economic disturbances sweeping the United States, George Caldwell was dropped from the pay rolls of the industrial giant he had so conscientiously served. He and his wife, who was shortly to enlarge George Caldwell’s responsibilities by another human soul, came to live with her parents, in Olinger, where Mr. Kramer had several years before purchased the handsome white brick house on Buchanan Road presently occupied by Dr. Potter. In the fall of 1933 Mr. Caldwell took up teaching duties at Olinger High School, duties he was never to put down.

How to express the quality of his teaching? A thorough mastery of his subjects, an inexhaustible sympathy for the scholastic underdog, a unique ability to make unexpected connections and to mix in an always fresh and eye-opening way the stuff of lessons with the stuff of life, an effortless humor, a by no means negligible gift for dramatization, a restless and doubting temperament that urged him forward ceaselessly toward self-improvement in the pedagogic craft- these are only parts of the whole. What endures, perhaps, most indelibly in the minds of his ex-students (of whom this present writer counts himself one) was his more-than-human selflessness, a total concern for the world at large which left him, perhaps, too little margin for self-indulgence and satisfied repose. To sit under Mr. Caldwell was to lift up one’s head in aspiration. Though there was sometimes-so strenuous and unpatterned was his involvement with his class- confusion, there was never any confusion that indeed “Here was a man.”

In addition to a full load of extra-curricular school activities, including the coaching of our gallant swimming team, the management of all football, basketball, track and baseball tickets, and the supervision of the Communications Club, Mr. Caldwell played a giant’s role in the affairs of the community. He was secretary of the Olinger Boosters’ Club, Counsellor to Cub Pack 12, member of the Committee to Propose a Borough Park, vice-president of the Lions and chair man of that service club’s annual light-bulb-selling campaign for the benefit of blind children. During the recent War he was Block Warden and a willing instrument in many aspects of the Effort. Born a Republican and a Presbyterian, he became a Democrat and a Lutheran, and was a staunch contributor to both causes. For many years a deacon and church-council member of the Redeemer Lutheran Church of Olinger, upon recently moving to a charming rural house in Firetown, his wife’s family “homestead,” Mr. Caldwell promptly became a deacon and member of the council of the Firetown Evangelical-Lutheran church body. Such a tabulation by its very nature cannot include the countless nameless works of charity and good will by which he, originally an alien to the town of Olinger, wove himself so securely into its fabric of citizenship and fellowship that, him gone, the cloth seems all undone.

He is survived by a sister, Alma Terrio, of Troy, New York; and by his father-in-law, his wife, and his son, all of Fire town.

AS I LAY ON MY ROCK various persons visited me. First came Mr. Phillips, my father’s colleague and friend, his hair indented by the memory of a shortstop’s cap. He held up his hand for attention and made me play that game which he believed made the mind’s hands quick. “Take two,” he said rapidly, “add four, multiply by three, subtract six, divide by two, add four, what do you have?”

“Five?” I said, for I had become fascinated by the nimbleness of his lips and so lost track.

“Ten,” he said, with a little rebuking shake of his in flexibly combed head. He was a tidy man in all things, and any sign of poor coordination vexed him. “Take six,” he said, “divide by three, add ten, multiply by three, add four, divide by four, what do you have?”

“I don’t know,” I said miserably. My shirt was eating my skin with fire.

“Ten,” he said, puckering sadly his rubbery mouth. “Let’s get down to business,” he said. He taught social science. “Give me the members of Truman’s cabinet. Remember the magic mnemonic phrase, st. wapnical.”

“State,” I said, “Dean Acheson,” and then I could remember no more. “But truly,” I called, “tell me, Mr. Phillips, you’re his friend. Is it possible? Where can the spirits go?”